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Moderators: martimiz, Sean, Ed, biapar, Willr, Ingo, swaiba

PDFGeneration - Anyone tried it??


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26 Posts   14387 Views

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BLU42 Media

Community Member, 71 Posts

3 February 2009 at 11:11am

Hi-

I need to set up some report pages and have my client be able to print them to PDF files. Has anyone tried the PDFGeneration module? Or, if you see this Sam, could you shed some light on its usage?

Thanks!
John

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Peter_SS

Community Member, 19 Posts

17 August 2010 at 6:26am

i have similar problem does anyone uses the PDF Generation module?

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UncleCheese

Forum Moderator, 4102 Posts

17 August 2010 at 7:38am

That module is not very good. A lot of work to get the requirements in place, and very little return on investment. I spent a good week or two researching the landscape of PDF generation, and finally settled on something decent, but even then you have to be really careful about your markup.. using attributes to define presentation, inline styles, etc. There really aren't any PDF generators out there that are very tolerant of modern layouts.

Let me know if you're interested and I can send you some code.

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swaiba

Forum Moderator, 1899 Posts

17 August 2010 at 8:24am

Hey UC,

Any chance you'd share it with me too? I'm moving away from the terible FPDF that I have inherited.

Barry

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Willr

Forum Moderator, 5523 Posts

17 August 2010 at 6:45pm

UncleCheese what did you end up settling on? I've been using http://github.com/antialize/wkhtmltopdf for a couple of upcoming projects and initial results are pretty decent.

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BLU42 Media

Community Member, 71 Posts

17 August 2010 at 6:53pm

I tried using the module too... I couldn't get it to work properly. I ended up using DOMPDF. It has some limitations, though I was quite impressed with it's functionality. We needed PDF generation for a table that spanned several pages with images in some of the cells and it handled it perfectly well.

-John

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UncleCheese

Forum Moderator, 4102 Posts

18 August 2010 at 1:20am

@everyone -- Give me a few days to track down all the code and package it up. It's not exactly a snippet. There are several dependencies and example usages you'll need to see. Keep checking this thread, and I'll get something up soon.

@willr
I used DOMPDF with some success. Of all the products I tested, that was the one that gave the most consistent and predictable results. But I still had to basically learn exactly how it wanted the HTML and CSS, set up page breaks where needed, and about a week's worth of various other headaches. I also had to hack it to pieces in order to get SS to autoload the classes (the class names didn't match the file names).. so that was a big mess, too.

But in the end, it got us what we wanted, and we have a really sophisticated application that generates proposals on the fly for clients all over the world. Very cool app: http://www.desalt.net

The link you sent looks familiar. I'd be really surprised if I didn't try it, but I'll take another look.

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Peter_SS

Community Member, 19 Posts

19 August 2010 at 8:40pm

Thanks Uncle Cheese!. I've been waiting for a nice SS PDF Generator module.

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